What Better Time Than In The Mid-Fourteenth Century

What better time than in the mid-fourteenth century Europe for a pandemic to strike. Populations in European cities were at the highest they had ever been, which often meant many individuals living within the same cramped residence. In recent years, grain had also become scarce due several consecutive bad crops years, resulting a decline of livestock, and a rise in famine. This situation, coupled with the present society’s minimal knowledge on germ contamination and basic hygiene created the ideal conditions for a contagion to prosper; and prosper it did. The black plague, endemic to Asia, made its second emergence into Europe in the year 1346. Six centuries earlier, the plague had made its first appearance ravaging the Mediterranean world,
Frustrated after losing a siege for the city of Kaffa in present day Crimea, Janibeg Khan in a last-ditch effort catapulted the diseased corpses of his army before retreating. From there, the pestilence made its way to Genoa, Italy where it subsequently went on to strike nearly every port in the Mediterranean, and seep into inland Europe. Within only seven years, the disease had woven its way through the entire continent, bringing death and despair wherever it appeared and ultimately killing approximately 60 percent of the entire European population. With such an enormous loss of life in such an incredibly short amount of time, many aspects of European culture underwent a drastic change. Literature, art, medicine, social institutions, religion and many more were all acutely affected by the emergence and lingering of the black plague. As a conglomerate, all of these factors would consequently play a crucial role in aiding the rise of the Renaissance in the coming
No one was exempt from the possibility of contracting the disease, and as such, the experience was shared by the entire continent as a whole. Subsequently, this era of hopelessness lead to misfortune, death, and religion becoming frequently apparent within any artistic representations. Much of the literature produced during this time was primarily focused on or around the plague, and is especially useful today for understanding the mindset of the residing populace by providing us with first hand accounts of the horrors of experiencing such a gruesome epoch. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, though a work of fiction, provides us with a unique insight into life in plague-ridden Florence. The story, comprised of 100 varying tales, centres around seven women and three men who aim to escape the city, where Boccaccio himself had lived, during the rise of the pandemic. The vernacular literary style Boccaccio wrote in is especially useful in giving insight to the medieval psyche, and the assumptions made around the disease in regard to how it began, and how it spread. Boccaccio noted that “[The plague] propagated itself without respite from place to place and so calamitously had spread into the West”, pinning blame on the East for the arrival of the pestilence, since they were considered, from an Italian perspective, lesser-civilized. Due to the superstitiously religious nature possessed by many medieval Europeans,